On the Method of Lossless Data Compression Using Spans of Varied Bit Widths

Many contemporary lossless data compression methods integrate run-length encoding, along with variations of Huffman coding and the Lempel-Ziv algorithm. It has been established that no lossless data compression algorithm can effectively reduce the length of any file. Consequently, specific compression techniques may yield better results for certain types of input data, while others may be more suitable for different scenarios. This paper outlines the most common features and techniques utilized in lossless data compression methods that employ spans of varying bit widths. The implementation of span compression, which utilizes fixed-width headers to encode information about span properties, was compared with variations of Huffman encoding and the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm using files from the Canterbury Corpus. The obtained results indicate the potential of span compression.